Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line

In Struggle!

The CPC(ML): A Revisionist Organization of Agent-Provocateurs

Conclusion: Saboteurs sent by the bourgeoisie won’t just turn over and die

No! The CPC(ML) is not the “political party of the proletariat”. It is a neo-revisionist and social-fascist party – a party which, while raising hue and cry about the “purity” of Marxism-Leninism and the struggle against revisionism, has in no way broken with the revisionism of the Communist Party of Canada on any key question of program. Worse than that, CPC(ML) has developed positions which are even farther to the right than the CP, if speaking in such terms has any meaning.

For a while, nationalist positions led the CP to consider that Canada was a colony. The same nationalist positions led it to support supposedly patriotic sections of the imperialist bourgeoisie during the Second World War. As well, the CP never resolutely defended the Quebec nation’s right to self-determination, thereby demonstrating flagrant chauvinism. And the same nationalist conceptions led it to undertake its work in the working class on the basis of the different ethnic groups. Well, all these deviations, and so many more, are to be found in CPC(ML)’s program in an even more extreme form.

But, worse than that, in the case of CPC(ML), it’s not a matter of mistakes which might lead to revisionist degeneration, since CPC(ML) has never adhered to Marxism-Leninism other then verbally, it has used the most tailist demagogy imaginable. In fact, the CPC(ML) and its chairman Hardial Bains, never adhered to the Marxist theory of class struggle. All the fundamental concepts which they claimed to base themselves on were watered down to nothing.

The scientific point of view of history and class struggle was replaced by the idealist vision of the radical, small and even big bourgeois. The Marxist-Leninist conception of imperialism, the State, the party, or of course, the dialectical materialist vision of history, with a wave of his magic wand, Bains changed them all into their opposite: idealism and metaphysics a nationalist point of view, and reactionary anti-imperialism.
At this point, we could call it quits and brush CPC(ML) aside as a group of students who wanted to play at Red Guards. We could just laugh them off. Yes, it’s quite right to affirm that CPC(ML) is a caricature of Marxism and that it is widely rejected by the masses. Yes, the CPC(ML) gives the impression that it changes its line every time it creates a new front-group to give the illusion that it’s actually leading something in Canada. But as this pamphlet indicates, we would be sadly mistaken to shrug them off so lightly, because if this party isn’t the political party of the proletariat, it isn’t the party of a few wild-eyed students, either...

Hardial Bains came to Canada, according to his own account, in 1959, joined the Communist Party of Canada, and then founded different parties, all led by him, which systematically followed the same path mapped out by the “great chairman”. Hardial Bains, who systematically falsifies, not only the history of Canada, but his own as well. Hardial Bains, great specialist in “foreign relations”, is not a wild-eyed student. Not on your life. And his group, as it proceeds from provocation to provocation, publishing reams of newspapers which no one buys, extracting impressive quantities of money from who knows where which it uses to gain the sympathy of foreign parties and organizations, organizing tour after tour in Canada, and around the world, this group called the “CPC(ML)” is just much too useful to the bourgeoisie to die from a terminal case of “foolishness.”

By taking a closer look at this “foolishness’, we soon see its true logic – the logic of an ultra-right-wing group, a group of provocateurs and counter-revolutionaries, who seek no less than to sabotage the Marxist-Leninist movement in Canada and in as many other countries as possible, too. Since the very beginning of the Internationalists, the CPC(ML) has been nothing more than the history of provocations, hypocrisy, lies and fascist-like attacks against workers, especially communist workers. The CPC(ML)’s line and practice are ultimately very coherent, and despite all the costume changes, they have remained unchanged. “Three worlds theory” or no “three worlds theory”, nationalism or chauvinism, economism or terrorism, infiltration or violent attacks – they might all seem contradictory, but in fact are but the many sides of the same class aspiration, all aimed at strengthening the Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie.

Ultimately, the CPC(ML) is the seed of fascism. The tree has no leaves yet but the roots are in fertile ground. CPC(ML) is trying to take advantage of the worsening crisis of imperialism, the mounting mass movement, the growing discredit of the revisionist and social-democratic parties and the absence of a real communist party in Canada. As well, it is attempting to profit from extremely sharpened struggle within what, since the early seventies, has been called the new Canadian Marxist-Leninist movement, and within the international communist movement as well.

The history of this group which calls itself the “Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist)” should make us aware of one thing – despite the fact that it has up until now failed to mobilize the masses behind it, this group nonetheless constitutes a great danger, which, if it is not resolutely fought on the basis of principles, is likely to continue its work of sabotaging the revolution in Canada and around the world. If we allow the seed of fascism to grow it will be as if we were letting disease spread to an entire organism. That is why it is our duty, and the duty of all workers and Marxist-Leninists, to uproot the acts and influence of this revisionist party, making sure to get every last root. The only way to definitively liquidate this bourgeois agent disguised as a Marxist-Leninist is to seriously, rigorously, and systematically deepen the criticism of this counter-revolutionary group.

But what we can learn from CPC(ML)’s line and history go beyond the limits of the group itself, which, despite its extreme character, is part of the more general trend of neo-revisionism. It’s not enough to cry “Down with revisionism” to really struggle against revisionism. The ultimate justification which Bains gave to explain the self-proclamation of his party was that it was necessary to struggle against revisionism. As if the struggle against revisionism consists of adding the words “Marxist-Leninist” after the letters CP.

But this treachery is not limited to the CPC(ML). We have only to think of the Canadian Communist League (Marxist-Leninist) a champion of the “three worlds theory” in Canada. It, too, endlessly hollers “Down with the revisionism of IN STRUGGLE!” But we’re still looking for some evidence to substantiate all these cries. But it’s now clear that the League’s incapacity to offer any proof of our group’s so-called revisionism looks a lot like CPC(ML)’s “anti-revisionism”: a lot of hot air to better hide the revival of the nationalist and revisionist positions of the CP and all other falsifiers of Marxism.

But such anti-revisionists are also present on an international scale. There are an awful lot of so-called Marxist-Leninist parties which also shout a lot about “Down with revisionism” so that they can, in fact, return to the same line of nationalism and betraying of the working class, just like the revisionist parties in France, Belgium, etc. How many of these parties objectively play the same role as the CPC(ML) by sabotaging the principled unity of authentic Marxist-Leninists in their country around a communist program? The struggle against revisionism isn’t a question of labels and appearances, but a question of political line. The rupture with revisionism must be made on the basis of the program of the proletarian revolution in each country. This is also the basis for stripping away the mask of the neo-revisionists who liquidate the essential questions of program so as to take up the line of sabotaging the proletarian revolution in their country.

But there is a second general lesson that we must learn from the analysis of CPC(ML)’s history, and that is that even if revisionists have been condemned by history, they still have “nine lives”. It’s easy to laugh off these trends whose positions so clearly oppose the everyday facts and reality of class struggle, but it would be a serious error to think that these anti-worker trends will die of their own volition. The only way to get rid of them is to actively combat them, because they are objectively detachments of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, bourgeois detachments which try and infiltrate the authentic Marxist-Leninist forces in order to sabotage the struggle to rebuild the party of the proletarian revolution.

At a time when more and more workers and progressive fighters have begun to distinguish real Marxist-Leninist from the falsifiers, it is essential that we alert the masses to the danger represented by these new revisionists, whose pretensions to support the masses are really nothing more than manoeuvres aimed at sabotaging them and leading them down the garden path just like the social-democrats and the revisionists of the communist parties of old have already done.

Furthermore, we must energetically oppose the anti-democratic attempts of these neo-revisionists to muzzle the communist point of view in the masses. Communists are not afraid of a confrontation of lines, even a confrontation between communist ideas and reactionary ones, because they know that their point of view is correct and that, when clearly presented, the truth will always win out in the end. But things are quite otherwise for revisionists and neo-revisionists who use Marxism-Leninism as a smokescreen to better hide their lies and distortions. They have no other choice but to spend their time dreaming up anti-democratic manoeuvres to prevent the communist point of view from being heard. That is why the struggle in the masses to denounce those manoeuvres and to unmask the distortions is an integral part of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and all reactionary forces.